True Legends
by Chaseblaire
Summary: Young Jack falls in love for the first time, and learns that the sea is a dangerous lover. Tia Dalma/Jack
1. Chapter 1

Jack sees his true love for the first time when he is a baby, nursing on his mother's breast. The woman stands in the water, _on _the water, barefoot and brown-skinned. She smiles at him with teeth scarred and pitted as a dishonest man's soul. Jack gurgles and coos.

Five years later Jack is still in love. The sea pulls at him, sucking on his toes as he dangles his feet from the dock, sitting too close to the edge with a child's boldness. He stares out over the swirling depths; the yawning maw clenches like a man's fist, laps at his feet like a kitten's tongue.

He slips into the water slowly, waist deep first, dangling from the dock like a fish on a hook. It is a simple thing to let go and fall into the bosom of the ocean, the caress of water as sweet and warm as a mother's touch. He closes his eyes and fancies he can hear singing, a hoarse, rich, slow crooning.

A hand comes out of the sky, warped and stretched by the water. It pulls Jack up, jerking and struggling to the air, where he gasps for breath he forgot he needed. "Jackie," growls the owner of the hand, a faceless man who seems as tall as cliffs behind him. "Jackie, beware. The sea is a fickle lover."

The next time Teague makes berth, Jack stands tall on chubby legs and asks his father if he can go a-pirating with him.

"No, Jackie," Teague says, "You'd just be getting in my way, boy, and we can't have that. I've no need for a useless whelp who knows naught the piratical arts. Learn the code, boy, and then we'll see."

He says this the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.

Jack is ten when he breaks his arm. Teague is at sea, and there is no one in Shipwreck Cove to scold Jack, warn him against playing too close to the rocks and climbing the masts of moored ships. Jack is scrambling up the side of a decrepit schooner when the rotted wood gives way beneath his summer-bare foot.

He falls backward, and the wind rushes in his ears like a scream, a song, the sea. He hits the deck of the sloop below with a _thud _and a _crack_ as the big bone in his forearm snaps in two. Jack does not feel the pain at first, and stares, fascinated at the bloody ends of skin and bone-fragments.

A port prostitute binds him up later, one the ubiquitous whores who flock where sailors convene, because sailors are always good business, desperate after weeks or months at sea. She eases Jack's skinny arm into the bowl of casting mixture, forms the binding around his elbow with professional precision.

"How the mighty have fallen, Jack!" She _tsks_, and looks sad and angry and amused all at the same time. "You've made _quite_ the mistake."

She bends over his arm and her hair tickles his wrist. One of her breasts has fallen out of her low-cut bodice. The skin is moon-white, crisscrossed with bluish veins like little rivers, but her nipple is as rosy red as the inside of a man's mouth.

She kissed Jack on the forehead. "You'll be quite the charmer one day, Jackie, If you live long enough," she whispers into his ear like a blessing, "Think what might've happened!"

But Jack does not think about it, because hypotheticals do not matter. There is only what _did _happen, and anything else is the worry of philosophers and madmen.

The whore tells Jack he will not be able to use his right arm for a while, but the loss of his leading hand does not bother him. He learns to swordfight and pickpocket with his left hand, and when the other boys swim he studies the Code and reads, kicking his feet in the water while his cast stays dry. Jack learns words like _accord_, _acquiesce, disinclined._ They roll off his tongue like waves on the sand.

He meets the woman again when he is twelve. She has been calling him more and more strongly over the years. She comes to Jack in his dreams, her hair like a knotted coil of snakes, skirts ragged and torn like a boy's skinned knee. Jack stands on the dock, a summer's grime on his bare feet, his hair knotting and fraying in the wind like rope. Teague's ship pulls in and the captain steps down from the gang plank with a hunter's grace, a lion's grace. Deadly.

Jack watches his father with kohl-lined eyes, lidded against the strong sunlight. He admires the scars scattered across Teague's face, each one proof of another breathtaking adventure, each one the testimony of another narrow escape.

"Aren't you going to ask me if you can come with me, Jackie?" Teauge drawls, words dropping smoothly from his lips like marbles, like loose teeth after a bar fight.

"No," Jack wets his lips, starts again, "No, I'm afraid not."

When Teague finds Jack stowed away in the rope locker a week later, he laughs and laughs while Jack rattles off the plea for Parlay.

"The sea's a dangerous lover, Jack" Teague warns.

Days later, Jack stretches out his toes as he dangles his feet from the crow's nest. Gulls gulp and wheel overhead and men hurry across the deck below, like ants. The sea breeze kisses his cheek, and a woman laughs in his ear like a blessing, like a curse.


	2. Chapter 2

When he meets his lover in the flesh for the first time, Jack is barely a man grown, still scraping together the sparse hairs on his upper lip and calling them a mustache. He has been pressed ganged into naval service, found pissing in an alley and clubbed from behind. Jack wakes up on a British man-o-war, and is promptly handed a bucket and mop before he can rub his head and say, "Ow".

Jack does not mind; he has been in worse situations and there is _no _situation that Jack Sparrow cannot twist to his advantage. However, he dislikes the strictness of military discipline, and the endless reputation; He is forced to scrub the decking with lye until his knees and palms smart like a man's wounded pride. The men in the rigging hoot and catcall as he kneels, rump in the air.

Jack resolves sleeps with one eye open.

Sometimes, when he draws the midnight watch, Jack fancies he can hear singing on the wind. He still dreams of _her_, the woman with rum dark skin and a voice as rich as Aztec chocolate.

"I'm a-coming for you Jack Sparrow," she croons in his ear, her accent stretching the end of his name taught as a sail in full wind, "Or should I say, you're a-coming for _me._"

Jack is unsurprised when a storm strikes days later. Lighting cracks in the sky and the sea turns black as pitch. Waves threaten to swamp the deck, rushing swells that would send pirates scuttling for cover, but navy boys stand their ground. Consequently, many are swept overboard.

In all the commotion, a lowly cabin boy is unnoticed. Jack takes a deep breath and dives into the stormy ocean, straight as an arrow from years of practice. He feels the shivery feeling of a woman's fingertips brushing against his cheek before all goes black.

When he wakes up, Jack is sprawled on a beach, waves licking at his boots. Behind him a river winds into a thick jungle. Through the foliage steps a woman, bare feet peeping from under her tattered skirts.

"You know, love, you're _literally_ the girl of my dreams. What say you to that?" Jack murmurs thickly, swaying as he blinks the salt water out of his eyes.

"This has been long in coming, Jack Sparrow. I am glad to see you in the flesh." Her gaze travels down Jack's body with interest, piercing him to the bone. Her smile widens and Jack sees blackened teeth and shivers.

"What's your name, love?" He asks.

"I am called Tia Dalma," she drawls, voice rough and smooth at the same time like velvet rubbed the wrong way. She kisses him and Jack falls into water, a child dangling his toes in the ocean.

He rolls her over, pressing her against the sand, kissing her throat, the top of her breasts where they threaten to escape her bodice. She tastes of salt, of rotting fish. He slips his hand under her dress and feels warm sand, sea weed.

Jack pushes her skirts up and pulls down his breeches. Tia Dalma rests back on her elbows, skin glowing like polished wood, as Jack groans above her.

"You're mine, Jack Sparrow," She tells him, and Jack, gasping her name, has to agree.

Later, she takes him back to her lean-to hut on the river. Tia feeds Jack gumbo out of a copper pot hanging above the fire, lends him dusty robes to wear as his clothes dry. They share her bed, limbs tangled as the ceiling planks creak and threaten to cave in.

The next day, although his clothes are dry and his belly full, Jack stays. And the next day, and the next, and the next.

One evening, Jack is sprawled naked on his stomach across Tia's bed. Tia sits across his back, braiding charms in his hair, waxing and twisting it into gypsy locks. She tells him, in her richly accented voice, about Krakens and ghosts and men who cannot die. Jack listens, eyes closed, as she speaks of treasure, mermaids, Davy Jones.

"One day," he tells her, smiling, voice strained by her weight on his back, "One day, you'll tell some other poor, ensnared sailor lad about the illustrious Captain Jack Sparrow, while beading trinkets in his hair."

She bites his neck in answer, and when he rolls on top of her the coins in his hair tinkle and chime.


End file.
